#uhmlg16 – great summer conference: teaching excellence

I’ve just had a great couple of days at the UHMLG Summer conference in Glasgow. The theme was teaching excellence, which was just up my street. All the tweets are available on a Storify, but I thought I’d put down a few thoughts.

there were great speakers, and plenty of food for thought. Here’s some of the good stuff:

First off Alison Brettle talked about “Demonstrating the value of health and academic library information and knowledge workers“.

She recognised that impact – the difference or change resulting from contact with the library service – was sometimes intangible, and hard to demonstrate was specifically the result of library input. For example yes, we may provide information to answer a clinical question, but this will not be the only input that might be responsible for an improvement in outcome for the patient. She also raised the fact that in terms of demonstrating outcome, quantitative measures were most commonly used, but qualitative measures were often more meaningful.

She cited lots of papers that she extracted data from as part of her scoping review around the value of LKS workers (interesting aside, were her comments about the difference between a scoping review (chart data, rather than appraise the data)).

It was interesting what a low value user satisfaction surveys have – really, it’s no use to us to know that library users like the service we provide. We need to be able to show what difference we make to the outcomes that matter to our stakeholders.

Interesting and frustrating outcome of Alison’s work seemed to be the variety of ways by which impact was reported– with so much variation it’s not possible to make any reasonable comparisons. So just as reporting of RCTs or systematic reviews needs consistency to be able to compare, so we as library professionals should be working to make it as easy as possible to show that one service makes as much impact as another by using the same reporting methods or the same core outcomes.

What return on investment is NOT is a user satisfaction survey, as mentioned above. We need to ensure that we talk in terms of what stakeholders value, and use the terminology that they will understand. How many times do librarians stand accused of too much librarian jargon? If we don’t adapt our language and presentation then the message will be lost.

Now it’s true, that impact of librarianship on the outcome that will impress our stakeholders is sometimes hard to disentangle from other influences (an increase in the number of first class degrees might be influenced by access to library resources but we will never be solely responsible for this as an outcome), so presenting qualitative “stories” of the impact can be powerful evidence.